About the cassandra-stress tool

The location of
the cassandra-stress example files depends on
the type of installation:

Package installationsInstaller-Services installations

/usr/share/dse/cassandra/tools

Tarball installationsInstaller-No Services installations

installation_location/dse/resources/cassandra/tools

The cassandra-stress tool is a Java-based stress testing utility for basic
benchmarking and load testing a DataStax Enterprise cluster.

Data modeling choices can greatly affect application performance. Significant load testing
over several trials is the best method for discovering issues with a particular data model.
The cassandra-stress tool is an effective tool for populating a cluster and
stress testing CQL tables and queries. Use cassandra-stress to:

Quickly determine how a schema performs.

Understand how your database scales.

Optimize your data model and settings.

Determine production capacity.

The cassandra-stress tool also supports a YAML-based profile for defining
specific schemas with various compaction strategies, cache settings, and types. Sample files
are located in the tools directory:

cqlstress-counter-example.yaml

cqlstress-example.yaml

cqlstress-insanity-example.yaml

The YAML file supports user-defined keyspace, tables, and schema. The YAML file can be used
to design tests of reads, writes, and mixed workloads.

When started without a YAML file, cassandra-stress creates a keyspace,
keyspace1, and tables, standard1 or
counter1, depending on what type of table is being tested. These elements
are automatically created the first time you run a stress test and reused on subsequent
runs. You can drop keyspace1 using DROP
KEYSPACE. You cannot change the default keyspace and tables names without using a YAML file.

Usage

Package installations:

cassandra-stress command [options]

Tarball installations:

cd install_location/tools &&
bin/cassandra-stress command [options]

Run cassandra-stress with authentication

The following example shows using the -mode option to supply a username
and password: